I help manage an Exchange 2003 server for a local school. The school principal recently instituted a policy stating that all teachers need to check their email at least once a day. As (one of) the Exchange admins, I want to know if there's a way I can check up to see whether folks are following this policy.

I figure I would need to see two things:

unread counts for all mailboxes on the Exchange server

for the unread messages, I want to see the date the message was sent

In talking to the school IT consultant, I was told that there's no way to do this using Exchange. Are any of you familiar with a way to accomplish this?

BTW, if this can be solved via a cron-like script which gets all counts & dates, sticks it in a text file, and emails it to me, that's fine also. Whatever works.

2 Answers
2

Your best bet for this type of thing is to discover the Windows Powershell. Unfortunately, although it seems the work has been done for you, the learning curve is rather steep and it is unlikely there exists a single line answer for your needs.

So, I actually posted a link to that exact blog post, and when I read your response I was wondering where my response had gone. Turns out I posted it in the wrong thread... stupid me. This definitely seems to be the best answer.
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eykanalNov 19 '09 at 16:13

It's low-tech (and cludgy) but if your goal is to see who's logged on and when, that's available in System Manager under administrative groups[org_name]\servers[server_name]\first storage group\mailbox store\logons

That'll tell you recent logon dates & times. I'd imagine you can check that at the end of the day and see who hasn't accessed their mailbox within 8 hours.

If it's not scriptable, you can export that list from the context menu, but ugh... I hope somebody has a more automated solution.